ABSTRACT
The fundamentals of Adaptive Resilience Theory (ART), a life and social systems model that radically redefines service burnout as resilience-building, are explained in this chapter. Composed of four phases: stability, collapse, reorganization, and exploitation, ART embraces collapse as a necessary and vitalizing phase for reorganizing service. Two case studies demonstrate how this model works: one of a volunteer in a soup kitchen for the homeless and the other of a psychotherapist volunteering as the facilitator of a battered women’s support group. Exercises provide readers their own opportunities to inventory their needs and gifts for service rather than pretending they can provide whatever a service situation demands.
